On this installment of Ode to Gravity, Charles Amirkhanian unearths rare gems from Lou Harrison’s personal record collection. Amirkhanian focuses on percussion music from the late 1930s and early 1940s, broadcasting selections by American composers Harrison, Henry Cowell, Johanna Beyer and William Russell. Many of these recordings were made live at one of John Cage’s famous percussion concerts, in 1939 at the Cornish School in Seattle. The final selection features Leopold Stokowski conducting Harrison’s Canticle #3 at New York’s MOMA. The recordings were made from Harrison’s rare 78 and 33 rpm acetate transcription discs.


This audio is part of the collection: Other Minds Audio Archive
It also belongs to collections: Music & Arts; stream_only

Date: 1971-03-10
Keywords: KPFA-FM; Ode to Gravity Series; Lou Harrison; Percussion Music; New Music; acetate discs; 78rpm

Creative Commons license: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0

Notes

Funding for the preservation of this program made possible through a grant by the GRAMMY Foundation.

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Reviewer: Charles Amirkhanian - - March 30, 2007
Subject: Steve Layton on Harrison Collection
Just discovered this nice mention on Sequenza21.com blog of composer Steve Layton: The pieces on these recordings represent the core of the West-Coast experimentalist group (I know, I know, Harry Partch; but he was off on his own very different journey). . . You just can’t get much closer to sitting in on the roots of this exciting period.